The answer: everything. Remember that your clients are people first, and their status as one of your clients comes second. Knowing how to tend to needs of your customers will literally make difference between a long and prosperous career in fitness industry, or a short-lived stint that leaves you wondering what career path you should try next!

In order to assist you in walking down success path, here are six methods that you can use to "WOW" your clients on a regular basis, keeping them happy, loyal to you, and engaging in long-term prosperous business relationships. In no particular order they are: contact, date and event recognition, listening, flexibility, forward thinking, and over-delivering.

Contact

When you get a new personal training client, many people will still second-guess their decision to hire you. After all, a personal trainer can be an expensive asset, and your clients need to believe that they made right decision. One of easiest ways for you to ease their mind in beginning as well as during course of their training program is by simply staying in contact with them.

Most clients will see you at most 3 times each week, and some clients even less than that. With at least 4 days in each week when your clients don't see you, you are influencing them less than 50% of time! Many clients hire a personal trainer because they need constant guidance and support, and less than 50% could hardly be considered constant.

An easy solution to this is to send your clients a few emails a week, or mail them an actual snail mail letter once in awhile. Clip an appropriate article from a magazine and make copies of it to mail to your clients, or email them URL of a great motivational story about weight loss that you found on Internet. Forward them funny anecdotes about health and fitness, or drop them a postcard congratulating them on their latest progress.

For that matter, pick up phone! Call Suzie Client on Saturday to let her know that you just got done updating her client record and had reason to again marvel at how great she is doing with her program. You just can't pay for type of customer feedback you will get from something like that!

Stay in contact with your clients in between training sessions, and increased attention will remind them on a regular basis that in beginning you committed to a one on one training program for them, not just to stand there 3 times a week while they exercise.

Date and Event Recognition

Recognizing special dates in your client's lives is another great way to show them that you are thinking about them in between training sessions.

-Send your clients a birthday card, or even a small but thoughtful gift.

-Congratulate them on their wedding anniversary, or even send flowers or a card to their house.

-Ask them how excited they are about upcoming graduation of their child from high school or college.

-Have a special token of your appreciation sent to their home or office after a set amount of time that they have been training with you - maybe annually or semi-annually.

-Give them a special award every time they lose 5 pounds, or drop a percentage of body fat.

-Attend race or other fitness event that you have been training them for.

As you can see, possibilities are limitless. The lesson that you want to take away from this section is that you went above and beyond call of duty to recognize a date or an event that was important to your client. They won't forget that when it comes time to decide whether or not to keep working with you!

Listening

The fact that you should listen to your clients should go without saying. If your title is "Personal Trainer", please take a moment at this time to re-read first word! Too many trainers fall into familiar trap of just taking their clients through workouts. Your clients aren't paying you to workout with them. They are paying you to give them dedicated one on one service, and actual workout is only one part of that.

In addition to exercise programming, you must again think about fact that your clients are humans before they are clients. As humans, they have as many outside considerations as you do. If you are only seeing them 3 hours per week, that leaves 165 hours each week when you are not around, and lifestyle events that happen during that time will spill over into training sessions.

That doesn't exactly roll off tongue though, does it?

The point is same, however. Before we were even able to stand fully erect we could literally fight for our right to live on a daily basis. Now, we are again barely standing up straight due to bad posture and bad habits, but we can hardly walk across town without pulling a muscle or throwing our back out!

Why? We are weak - from inside out! In today's image conscious society, we are so concerned with way we look that we ignore fact that we are falling apart from inside. For lack of a better term, we are "rotten to core"!

What IS "the core"? Why does everyone keep talking about training 'the core"? What does any of this have to do with cavemen?

Basically, idea here is that there was a time in human evolution when we literally had to fight to survive. Although actual battle was certainly part of life back in Stone Age, we are also talking about day to day struggle that was involved in just making it to see another sunset!

Walking, running, climbing, throwing, pushing, pulling, balancing, lifting, pressing - list goes on and on. These activities were all a daily part of life way back when human body was being "programmed".

Compare that to present day activity level of an average person in a civilized culture, and what do you get? A MAJOR difference between way we were built and way we are actually called upon to perform! If you took your average office worker in 2005 and threw them back in time to a point when fur was "in", they probably wouldn't last for very long.

Is it wrong that modern technology has made our lives so easy? Probably not - depending on who you ask. However, is it wrong that we don't keep our bodies as strong and vital as we used to HAVE to keep them? YES!

Just because you CAN sit down all day, and just because you CAN eat 1,000 calories in less than 20 minutes, and just because you CAN pay someone else to mow your lawn doesn't mean that you SHOULD do those things.

Allowing our easy lives to make us weak is OUR fault. It's not your boss at work who tells you that you can't exercise when you aren't pulling desk time. It's not your mother or father who is making you eat at fast food restaurants every day. It's not your car that is making you drive it ¼ mile to store instead of just walking.